By LIESL SCHILLINGER

n the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta ''The Gondoliers,'' two lowly boatmen are made kings, and peasant girls become queens, at least for a while. In the resulting social chaos, the Grand Inquisitor wails, ''When everyone is somebodee, / Then no one's anybody!'' There is much in this paradox that must vex today's scholars of pop culture. A century ago, the average don would have blushed to teach literature in English, not Greek or Latin, let alone build a career out of discursive commentary on everyday life. But academe has changed, and hardly anyone would wish for a return to the rigid, elitist, impractical old standards.

Still, how can an au fait scholar manage to be both accessible and unfrivolous? The difficulty of answering that question may account for a tendency among certain professors to dish out disposable books of culture essays for lazy highbrows, books packed with insights so trivial and disconnected that they make you want to echo Gilbert and Sullivan: ''When everything means something, then nothing means anything!''

Luckily, in ''Symptoms of Culture,'' her seventh book, Marjorie Garber, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English and director of the Center for Literary and Cultural Studies at Harvard University, does not succumb to this distressing tendency. She must, however, write in awareness of it, knowing that a sea of less substantial contemporary collections will act as a foil to hers, and suspecting that her eloquent writing will grant the book a seriousness that its structure does not guarantee. In ''Vice Versa,'' a provocative inquiry into bisexuality, and ''Dog Love,'' her punning but earnest exploration of the bond between dog and human, Garber proved that when she has a theme for her thoughts, her gift for analytical gab has few rivals. But in ''Symptoms of Culture'' she has no theme, and does not want one. ''I do not propose to diagnose culture as if it were an illness of which we could be cured, but to read culture as if it were structured like a dream,'' she writes. This tack has been pursued already by such masters of the art as Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes and Camille Paglia. In this case, the result threatens to be an army of symptoms in search of a disease -- about as good an organizing principle as a collection of musical variations without a theme.

And yet, like a frustrating but fascinating hypochondriac, Garber describes her symptoms so engagingly that we don't mind the lack of diagnosis, hoping that they may in the end, as she suggests, ''add up to a syndrome.'' Whether or not they add up to a syndrome, they do add up to, on the whole, a fine group of eclectic essays. The first chapter is the scatty exception; here she seeks to deflate American fantasies of greatness by hopping a circuit that links Pete Rose, A. Bartlett Giamatti and classic books to George Michael, Wilbur the pig from ''Charlotte's Web'' and Richard Nixon. The connections sound glib, and her frequent citations of Shakespeare in this (as in other) chapters betray that even as she moans, ''We live in a desperate cult of greatness, in which even olives are 'Colossal,' '' she herself knows from greatness.

But the rest of the book's first half evinces impressive scholarship and astute social observation. Although in her introduction Garber repudiates the ''tyranny of the empirical,'' she has done her homework here, and her lucid synthesis of detail, documents and historical fact makes her core chapters strong. In ''Two-Point Conversion'' she tracks links between organized sports and evangelical Christianity (''God has had His hand on this football team,'' a Jacksonville Jaguars quarterback tells a reporter). Garber charts the increasingly vocal rise of male Christian athletic groups like the Promise Keepers, and when she discovers that members of a Jewish high school basketball team in Illinois were ordered not to wear yarmulkes on the court because they ''might cause harm to another player,'' her hegemony detector goes on red alert.

Not surprisingly, Garber's abiding interest is not sports, but the construction of identity within society, particularly by members of a minority group (gay, Jewish, nonwhite, transvestite) in that society. So from the foothold of ''sportianity'' she jumps to the subject of Jewish assimilation, examining Madeleine Albright's latter-day Jewishness, and exposing the hypocrisies of the 1947 film ''Gentleman's Agreement,'' in which Gregory Peck played a gentile reporter pretending to be Jewish, and many other roles were played by Jewish actors with Hollywood-approved WASP names. She revisits the Scopes ''monkey trial'' to drive home the point that some Bible Belt schools now sidestep the issue of whether to teach creationism or evolution by teaching both. She concludes her exploration of homogeneity in the United States with a slim chapter on Jell-O, which becomes a metonym for America -- a denatured substance that seals unrelated objects in a sweet, confining aspic.

The second half of the book abandons assimilation to get a fix on that unsuspected American epidemic, addiction to Shakespeare allusions. Garber berates American politicians who quote him for their own selfish ends, digs up dirt on the mystery of why he bequeathed his wife his second-best bed, dips into the resonance of Roman numerals (which he, unaccountably, did not use to number his plays) and suggests that Shakespeare is a signifier of intelligence that Americans flourish like so many greenbacks.

And yet, Garber herself cites Shakespeare as often as Soviet academics once cited Lenin, dropping in the quotation ''The play's the thing'' during an attack on Senator Alan Simpson and twitting the poet Maya Angelou for saying that Shakespeare spoke to the ''condition of the black woman'' in ''The Merchant of Venice.'' In Garber's view, Portia is racist. Angelou and the others may be guilty of the ''ideological danger of fetishizing Shakespeare,'' as Garber warns, but they aren't the ones memorializing him page after page, and speculating, as Garber does, that ''Shakespeare as fetish is Shakespeare as phallus.'' The final chapter is an unexpected reverie on Jacobean drama, Freud, Meg Ryan and the female orgasm, in which Shakespeare does not appear, although perhaps he is implied.

Indeed, Shakespeare ends up as such a recurrent symptom in Garber's collection that he may amount to a syndrome in himself -- a Shakespeare surfeit syndrome. That, come to think of it, is a syndrome that even a dour old don wouldn't be afraid to write about.

Liesl Schillinger is a New York columnist for The Independent of London.